


Stargazer's Glade

by callmeflo



Series: a Mage's Bane [6]
Category: Moren-Ezen
Genre: Gen, Mage Prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-19
Updated: 2019-11-19
Packaged: 2021-02-13 12:42:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21494488
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callmeflo/pseuds/callmeflo
Summary: I’ve been having these daydreams for the last month.
Series: a Mage's Bane [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1533155





	Stargazer's Glade

_November 27th_

_I’ve been having these daydreams for the last month and it’s driving me mad._

_They always start out just as I’m drifting off, lying under the dark night sky with Madsie snuffling and sighing just out of sight. The galaxy of stars above me are in perfect focus and draw my eyes unfailingly._

_And then the stars join into constellations that come alive like the myths of old. Sometimes they gesture things to me, or seem to act like they’re in a play just for my eyes. Other times they blink and waver, the shapes twisting and flickering like a mix of morse code and sign language._

_I always know what every gesture means._

_Often they’re vague in their meaning, a warning with no details or a picture of hurried raindrops - things that are only understood as significant once the event has come to pass. Soon after the warning came a violent storm I had to hide from in an ancient city’s ruins, and following the raindrops I passed a village mourning for their valuable flock of sheep lost in a flash flood._

_With each passing night, they’re becoming more detailed and specific, and they are never wrong._

✧

Nawra has always been an active sleeper: sleep walking as a young child, wandering down to curl up by the forever warm stove in the main room; tossing and turning in hot weather but sleeping through it; eyelids fluttering with evidence of deep dreams. As she grew older she slept stiller and lighter, easier to wake at the sounds of the city at dawn, restless after a stormy night that rattled roof tiles and made the wooden fences creak and groan.

But she’s always talked in her sleep, spilling secrets and nonsense in equal measures. Before, her parents would chuckle over it and tell her the tale the following morning, hovering at her cloth wall for a few minutes to hear her dreams of that night. Later she’d roll her eyes and not care that she’d been cursing after the magebane filly or grumbling about dragging the cart of furs to the market.

Now it’s becoming more dangerous.

She can only imagine the reaction if she speaks of stars and magic within hearing distance of her father, and that’d be nothing compared to the repercussions if she spoke a prophecy.

‘Fire,’ she’d mutter. ‘It’s burning her, she wants her mama,’ she’d cry. And when a spark flies free from the great oven of the bakery a day later, lighting up and flattening the entire wooden structure within the hour, barely leaving the owner’s young daughter alive, what defence would she have?

Being accused of somehow starting the fire would not be the worst case scenario. Praying to the old gods for a friend’s business to be burnt down, and have that wish answered? Predicting that it would happen, as if the magic that decided their fate is literally within her?

She leaves a scribbled note on the dinner table, as she has for the last three scoutings since the All Hallow’s celebration, with barely a daytime nap in between them: _Been called on an urgent trip regarding the suspicion of bandits loitering near the western roads. Might be a week or two. Stay safe, Nawra._ Her belongings are already packed - or rather, they were never unpacked except for a quick wash with her mother’s soft, sweet scented soaps.

Nawra doesn’t know if this magic will stay with her long term, or whether it will seep into the early evening when the stars are just emerging and she doesn’t have sleep to hide the dreams, or if there’s a possibility of subduing them, or controlling them. But she has to try something.

Madsie is on a long rope tied to a ground stake, methodically neatening the grassy patches around her parents’ home. Nawra removes the rope from her head collar, unties the reins that had been knotted behind her ears, and then retrieves the saddle from its place on the fence nearby. Not a minute later she’s mounted in the soft seat made more of furs than wooden tree, and they’re on their way out of the city, eastwards bound.

The scouts of Moren Ezen have many tasks. They are to track the migration paths of wild animals, watch the lands around their city for dangers as well as catch glimpses of other settlements’, and keep an eye on weather patterns and water sources just to name a few.

In many cases the scouts are each given a specific task, and Nawra’s is primarily the trade routes and the travellers that both use and plague them. It’s half boring and half decidedly not, but it’s not the people she meets that have become her most valuable resource.

Tucked safely in a saddlebag away from the rain is a roughly printed map, scattered with charcoal scribbles: winding lines leading off from the main tracks for the hidden, quicker, but more dangerous back ways through the mountains; shaded patches that she’s noticed are hunting or nesting grounds of predators; little tent symbols etched on nooks and caves she knows are a good place to stay, and some crossed out with a dark X that are popular with bandits.

It also has labels in cramped, messy handwriting: _mirror pond, old treehouse, Wriysh overlook, ghost town, beware ravine!, sandstorm acres._

And in one spot, along the border where the pine forests meet the first mountains, it reads: _stargazer’s glade_. Hidden past a particularly dense thicket of redwoods and brambly berry bushes, at the flat peak of a small, grassy mountain, where the sky opens up above the wildflowers to reveal an untainted view of the heavens. The small plateau is the perfect size for a camp, with a dainty trickling stream within walking distance and no shortage of broken branches for firewood, plus blackberries and elderberries and flower petals to flavour boiled water.

It’s been Nawra’s favourite place since she found it on her first year of the job. She’d been gazing up at the sky scraping trees so mesmerised that she’d lost the path, and then got distracted by some small ferret-like creatures scrabbling to and fro in the underbrush. It had eventually been Madsie, once her reins were dropped loose, who had lead the way to this secret haven - she’d wandered out into the clearing and then joyfully trotted on up the incline, where she was quick to bury her head in the thick, lush grass.

And that is where she goes now. The answers she seeks are in the stars, several billions of miles away, and here she feels closer to them than anywhere else. 

**Author's Note:**

> seeking a peaceful, safe place to learn her emerging magics, Nawra takes Madsie up into the redwoods.
> 
> Word Count(1113 WC), Horse + Rider(+2), Magic Prompt(+4), Personal Work(+1) = 18EP for Nawra and Madsie


End file.
